9 Obscure WordPress Features You Didn’t Know Existed

At the rate WordPress is growing, it’s impossible to promote all of the awesome little bits and pieces it contains, which means that some features get overlooked.

In this post, I hope to show you at least a few things you don’t know about everyone’s favorite CMS. Get ready for awesome!

1. Paste to Make a Link

This one blows everyone away because so few people seem to know about it. When in visual mode in the post editor, you can select some text and paste to make the selected text a link. Usually, you would expect the selected text to be replaced with a link but not so in WordPress.

Time savings ahead!

Copy and paste to make a link

2. Delete the Post Name to Regenerate It

If you rename a post before it is published, you’ll generally want to edit the link to make sure the post name follows the post title. If you click edit and just delete the whole thing the post name will be regenerated based on the current title.

Stare in awe at the power of WordPress.

Changing the post name

3. Screen Options Are per User

Screen options may be something you already know about, but probably don’t take advantage of. They are not only saved in cookies and in the database but are stored per user, which means that you can set up a completely different layout for yourself than others would see.

The cookie-database saving means that you can set up a specific layout on one computer and then log in from a different device and still see your own layout. This isn’t very well-communicated in the admin, which is why users seem to be afraid to use it.

WordPress Screen Options

4. Markdown-Style Shortcuts

Since WordPress 4.3, you can use markdown-like syntax to make your writing a lot faster. Stars and dashes make lists, hashes make titles and so on.

Take a look at the announcement for more details on how to use this feature.

Editing Shortcuts

5. Multi-Page Posts

You can use the <!–nextpage–> tag to split content into multiple pages. WordPress will take all of your tags and generate the pagination based on them.

That said, I personally really,really dislike multi-page posts. The option is there if you want to use it, nonetheless.

6. WordPress Has Image Editing Power

Just like magic, WordPress can perform basic image editing tasks like rotating, cropping and resizing. No filters just yet, but this feature is pretty useful if you need to rotate an image the right way up quickly.

Select an image and click on the edit image link near the image thumbnail in the details section and off you go.

Image Editing In WordPress

7. WordPress Has a Filesystem API

Here’s one for the developers out there. The Filesystem API was created back in WordPress 2.6 to handle the auto-update features.

This is not one of those systems you’ll use every day, but when you need it, it’s nice to know there’s something in WordPress core to help you out.

8. Terms Now Have Metadata

As of the latest 4.4 release of WordPress, taxonomies now have metadata. Awesome!

This includes a new wp_termmeta table complete with get_term_meta(), update_term_meta() and all the other usual suspects.

9. Embed Third Party Content by Pasting a Link

WordPress uses oEmbed to allow you to embed Tweets, Vimeo and Youtube videos, Soundcloud and all sorts of other fun things in your content. In fact, you can just paste a link to the resource in question and it will be converted to an embed for you.

When version 4.4 is released, WordPress will become an oEmbed provider, so as long as you are running 4.4 and so is the blog you want ot target, you can even link to other WordPress sites’ content in this way.

Embedding Content With oEmbed

Do you know any cool hacks or obscure features in WordPress? Share your tips in the comments below.

Hello, I'm Daniel and I make things for the web. I'm the CTO at Kinsta and I write for a number of amazing publications like WPMU DEV and Smashing Magazine. In my spare time you'll find me playing board games or planning the next amazing office game like the not-at-all-destructive Megaball.

Re ‘3. Screen Options Are per User’, is there a way to set a specific initial default for new users? Or a way to disable this per-user setting? For less tech-savvy blog authors/ editors, it’s nice for me as an admin to be able to configure a good set of defaults, which in turn makes supporting those users a little simpler/ more predictable.

Here’s a number 10 for you guys – If you are in a screen with a huge list of fields, options or anything related and you want to scroll up to the beginning, just click on the top menu bar. Just like on iOS it scrolls the page all the way up for you.

I didn’t know about 1 and 8 (thanks), I am a heavy user of 2 and 9, and know about 3-4-5-6-7 but I barely use them (I should use more 4)

:)

— Here is my contribution to the list of obscure features —

I recently discovered that the multi-domain and domain mapping features were BUILT-IN WordPress! but without real interface.

Domain mapping and multi-domain plugins are useful to let your multisite users (subsites’ admins) to map their domain by themselves, or choose which domain their url will be a subdomain of, but if you manage the whole network and its subsites, you do not even need the plugins!!

When you create a subsite, (if the network is setup as subdomain), enter subsitename.mainsite.com

but then if you want the subsite to be a subdomain of another domain, then simply edit the site and edit its url, like subsitename.othername.com
or a full 2nd level domain name like subsitename.com

you can even go further and add subsub.sub.mainsite.com
(suppose you want a network of subsites such as cityname.statename.eventlists.com )

all of that without any plugin.

Note : For all those to work of course you have to have added the names as addons in the cPanel (or other host panel), and/or added wildcard subdomain as *.mainsite.com and/or *.othername.com) but this is also the case with the use of domain mapping plugins.

Just re: your point on adding domains in cPanel, I don’t use cPanel, I use Plesk, but I wonder if you can do what I do for mapped domains in multisite –

I add 1 IP address to my server per WordPress multisite installation. In the server settings I then set the domain of the main WordPress site as default for it’s IP address. The result of this is that any traffic coming in on http://www.unknowndomain.com on IP address 12.34.56.78 gets pointed at http://www.mainsite.com, at which point WordPress decides if it should load another site in the installation.

Downsite is it requires a new IP per install, upside is that no server admin is required when mapping domains.

Hi Dominic,
Thx for this additional information which will for sure be valuable for people coming reading here.
I have less IPs than number of WP installations (and other than WP scripts), so I can’t personally do that, but still, very nice to know!!

The point of my post was to say WP can handle the domain mapping without plugin (I was especially surprised about the subdomain of a 2nd domain, which we cannot add as such when creating new subsite, but which works when we edit the said subsite).

I didn’t know that until recently, despite being an “advanced user” :)

This feature is great for using WordPress, i have used markdown style editing and learned new email tips from here. Thanks for keeping me update for my website http://www.kalkifashion.com. Keep sharing